Killer_uk

I have a locked Barton 2500 CPU installed with some Crucial PC2100 RAM on an Asus A7N8X-X mobo. I increased the FSB yesterday from 166mhz to 170mhz. I thought all was well but when I played UT2004 for a couple of hours the system locked up. So, I restarted and recieved a blue screen when trying to boot windows. When I lowered the FSB back down to 166 windows booted properly and everything was fine again. Can you help me?


P.S Could my memory be something to do with it? I am going to upgrade to some GeIL 1gb PC3200 RAM soon.

applebyk

Your ram is almost without a doubt the problem. 2100 ram is rated for 133mhz, so having it running at 166mhz is a decent oc.

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No_Style

You can try to squeeze more life out of the RAM by increasing Memory Voltages

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SIK_L_CELL

Does that board have an AGP lock? If not then that might be your problem.

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Roadee

There is an AGP lock on that board I do believe......if I am not mistaken it is nothing more than a stripped down A7N8X-DLX board that is stripped down. The problem seems to point straight to the limitation of the memory that he is using. No biggie really since he is getting new memory for it already. Just hope the memory works for him. Some of those boards can really be finicky when it comes to memory......I remember some of the issues I had when I was building systems based on that board.

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Killer_uk

I think that the temps are not a problem as I have got 29c idle and 37c full load.

Hopefully that RAM should be ok, there are a couple of manufacturers I could go with, these are:

Corsair 1GB DDR Value Select PC3200 Kit (2x512MB) - £133.95
GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS 2.5 - £123.32

Which do you think are the best?


Thanks for the help you have given me already. Much appreciated

Judas

increase the fsb just a little without a pci/agp mhz lock will prevent the ratio switch to take effect. these ratios are 66/100/133/166/200 (your running 166 and problem your best bet would be 200 but with the cpu locked... er... not good).... if your running pc2100 at 1:1 ration of the FSB.. you seriously have overclocked the ram to PC2700 speeds... that is EASILY considered an excellent overclock... however i have my doubts.. your probably running "AUTO by SPD" settings for the ram.. it might tell you on bootup if the member is detected and or running "PC2100" or "266" or "PC2700" or "333"...... 4 mhz will serprise some people.... it can give pretty nice results... and it can also make a system very unstable.....

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Killer_uk

My memory is running at 133mhz at the moment So hopefully I should just be able to overclock more with new RAM? Also is DDR400 RAM capable at running at lesser speeds, e.g when Im overclocking my FSB in 5mhz increases?

Roadee

well.....personally I would not use the "value" line. You need memory with heat spreaders and low latency timings. You may also want to look at OCZ. That memory works very well with your motherboard.

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Judas

as far as i understand.. it depends on your mobo's chipset if you can oc the memory passed the FSB speeds.. (for example.. at 100/133 i can set my ram to 200... HOWEVER.. at 166 i can't...).... it's depenant on the ratio settings.... if you increase the fsb 5 mhz.. it might increase the memory say 1 or 2.... or 4. not sure how it's working.... might wanna check out your mobo's manual..

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Killer_uk

When I use the Nvidia system utility, the tool where you can overclock in windows (i dont actually use this by the way) when I overclock the FSB to e.g from 334mhz to 336mhz, the Memory bus changes from 267mhz to 268mhz. But, when AGP Bus setting stays at 66mhz. This give you any help to solving my problem?

P.S. I really want to spend as little as possible on my memory as Im also upgrading my GFX to a GeForce 6800 GT.
So, what do you recommend, Corsair or GeIL?

G@MeBoY

heat spreaders on "fancy" memory modules are worthless...just two plates covering the modules... for 5$ you can buy 10 times better "real" heatspreaders like speeze or something like that...

@ killer uk: your memory is bottleneck, from 133 to 166 is quite impressive IMO ! All you can try is running it assinhronius with FSB but dont know if your mobo can do it. A7N8X-X is not "just" stripped down A7N8X-deluxe ! It is pretty damn good strpped down, dosent have dualchannel, soundstorm, has less options in bios...
as for nvidia sistem utility - forget it ! use 8rdavcore program, google for it, it very smal download. I didnt quite understand your question about AGP bus...If you set it in BIOS at 66mhz, it will not change when you raise FSB...

As for Corsair vs Geil, if you are going for value select corsair or geil value ram, go for geil, I have tried/tested them and they are bouth good, but corsairs VS are usualy limited to some 220fsb, some go over to 230, but that was one module out of 12 tested and in single channel mode...

as for latencies, 2-2-2-11 will give you 100mb/s bandwith more (lets say 3500mb/s) over 3-4-4-11 and you will pay big bucks for that 100mb/s, which is hardly noticablle (but allows for potencialy higher OC-ing )

cheers !

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